Firefox 3.5 patch coming soon as Mozilla cranks up downloads

Mozilla Foundation notched up five million downloads in the first 24 hours after it released Firefox 3.5 earlier this week.

The open source browser maker also confirmed it would be bringing out version 3.5.1 soon to squash bugs its development team hadn’t managed to eradicate ahead of the launch.

Mozilla’s security patch is expected to rock up in the next few weeks. It will kill at least three bugs and “topcrashes” that remain present in the latest iteration of the popular Internet Explorer rival.

"[The] goal of this release should be a quick turnaround that fixes topcrashes and bugs we almost held ship for," said Mozilla earlier this week in its status meeting notes.

One of those fixes includes a patch for TraceMonkey, the outfit’s speedy JavaScript engine.

Indeed, Mozilla was forced to hold back the release of Firefox 3.5, nee 3.1, by about six months, because of the number of showstopping bugs it found in the pesky little monkey JavaScript engine.

The org didn't grab as many downloads this time around compared to a year ago when it spun out its last big release.

In June 2008 Mozilla pulled in over seven million downloads in the first 24 hours of Firefox 3.0 being available.

However, servers initially buckled under the pressure of all the traffic driven to Mozilla’s site after it urged people to help it break the Guinness World Record for the highest number of downloads in one day. It succeeded, despite the PR fiasco that ensued.

On Tuesday, when the final code for Firefox 3.5 was released, Mozilla suffered some outage trouble.

“I believe that was isolated to the Amsterdam datacentre and just for certain sites (most notably www.mozilla.com and getfirefox.com). My notes have that resolved sometime after 0845 PDT,” Mozilla’s Matthew Zeier explained to El Reg.

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